The always sincere, ironic and brilliant Wislawa Szymborska warns in one of her poems: “We read the letters of the deceased as imposing gods, / but gods after all because we know the later dates.” The volume Write if you will come (The Outskirts) brings together the correspondence that, from 1967 to 1985, she maintained with her partner, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, who is also a writer. He died in 1990 and six years later came “the Stockholm cataclysm,” as the Polish Nobel Prize winner humorously referred to the highest literary award that was awarded to her.
The letters, notes and postcards—many of them collages manufactured by the poet—now translated by Teresa Benítez, Katarzyna Moloniewicz and Abel Murcia, discover the games, jokes and affections that the poet and the writer concocted in that communist Poland, marked by scarcity and by a censorship that cannot reach the wit and tenderness of these two correspondents. From this exchange emerges the figure of Filipowicz, a writer today somewhat in the shadow of Szymborska, barely known to readers outside Poland and who, nevertheless, played an important role on the cultural scene.
Ten years older than her, Filipowicz was a member of the resistance to the German occupation and passed through several concentration camps. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry and screenplays. He had two marriages and two children before starting his relationship with Szymborska, who had already noticed him almost 20 years earlier. “They met in 1946 or 1947, at least that's what she remembered. She also said that while she was a member of the communist party a closer relationship was not possible: he was a socialist, but he was never a communist. They met again and fell in love in the mid-sixties,” Michal Rusinek, Szymborska's friend, secretary and president of her foundation, explains by email.
Filpowicz's rescue is at the origin of the presentation of this correspondence. A biography of the poet put the editors of The Outskirts on the writer's trail. With one of her novels, A provincial romance (2017), Francisco Llorca inaugurated the publishing label he founded with Magda Anglès. It was not very successful, but they insisted on continuing with Memoirs of an antihero (2019), which featured a foreword by Adam Zagajewski. By then these letters had already appeared in Poland. “The success exceeded our expectations and 40,000 copies were sold in a very short time,” explains Jerzy Illg, editor and founder of the Polish label Znak. “The letters turned out to have high literary value. They allowed us to get closer to the lives and feelings of the two correspondents, but above all that they were great literary entertainment. They assume fictitious personalities and engage in a game full of winks, jokes and myths that at times comes close to the theater of the absurd. It is not strange that they have already been taken to the stage.”
![Postcard dated November 1, 1968 from Wislawa Szymborska to Kornel Filipowicz. The poet writes: "There is my first leg that I extend towards home. When I send you the second leg, it will mean that I am irrevocably returning".](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/vffGXbGgMKUn-rdwNTJRiwLpqvk=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/FR4S2A3KCVDQBCEZPRWIAGDR7Q.jpg)
In view of all this, the publishing house Las Cercas decided to redouble their bet and launch themselves with this new volume. “In this epistolary exchange there are hardly any references to literary work,” Llorca explains on the phone. “What it shows is the intimacy of a couple with irony and a sparkling sensitivity, who create literature,” says Llorca.
![The poet Wislawa Szymborska and her partner, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, in an image provided by the publishing house The Outskirts.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/7Wy7XXvnbfrQp63Hv6da6wpEfAc=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/BSRALPJNVBAFNHE7ZGV72DGEPA.jpg)
Szymborska's secretary explains that upon receiving the Nobel Prize the poet wanted to support the publication of a selection of Kornel's stories. She “loved Him as a person, but also admired Him as a writer. And she regretted that she had fallen into oblivion after his death. But we already know that it is easier to publish books than to promote them or convince readers that they are worth reading. She gave up. When she died, we decided to publish the correspondence they had: loving letters, but in which they didn't share anything that was too intimate. The success of the book had a side effect: people also wanted to read Filipowicz's stories. Three volumes with a selection of her work have been published since then and Szymborska's wish has been fulfilled: he is no longer forgotten,” notes Rusinek.
Mutual influence
In the letters Szymborska appears tender and funny. “There is no gossip from Krakow, but in the next postcard I will try to make amends and something will occur to me. For now, the old Prussian jokes will have to suffice. Don't gorge yourself on fish! Kisses! I put my cheek behind your back and I am not unfaithful to you at all! Imagine! ”She writes in 1971. According to Rusinek, in these letters an early and unknown voice of the poet emerges, which those who met her in person knew. “There is also something much more important that this correspondence shows: the interest she had in nature began when she became intimate with Filipowicz. The attitude he had toward nature influenced her poetry. Likewise, the way she wrote letters, her word games and inclination towards stylization and fictitious characters, influenced the correspondence he sent her,” explains the expert, and emphasizes that when reading these epistles there is It must be taken into account that the correspondents were fully aware that a censor could access this exchange. “Love during the communist period was not easy. That may be one of the reasons why they used fictional characters and stylized their cards,” she ventures.
![Postcard dated August 9, 1976 from Kornel Filipowicz to Wislawa Szymborska included in the book 'You write if you will come' (The outskirts, 2023). The legend says: "How good it is to have neighbors".](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/qxjvs0323rCWOn1L8dXnPlPAjZ8=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/RBY2O5VSLNEINNCRLYWL4BZ4B4.jpg)
Beyond words, as shown in the illustrations in the volume Write if you will come, The communication and jokes between Szymborska and Filipowicz had at times a pop, creative and irreverent touch thanks also to the drawings and collages that illustrated his postcards. “She started making her cards in the early seventies because it was not easy to find beautiful postcards in Poland at the time. She sent them to people with whom she shared the same sense of humor, and Filipowicz was one of them. Szymborska loved the surrealists, Magritte especially, and she has something of this painter,” says Rusinek, and anticipates that they are preparing a volume that brings together all those postcards that the poet sent to her friends for next year. “In her correspondence Szymborska reveals not only her brilliant intelligence, but also her sense of humor and taste for everything crazy,” emphasizes the Polish editor Illg.
In the verses of the poem The letters of the deceased, Szymborska herself reflected in a more serious tone about what remains in those correspondences from times past: “Everything planned by them came out in a totally different way, / or a little different, that is, also totally different. / The most diligent look us naively in the eyes, / because they assumed that they would find perfection in them.”
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Kornel #Filipowicz #writer #shadow #Nobel #Prize #winner #Wislawa #Szymborska